The Beautiful Girls
by Kyilliki
Summary: The end of Breaking Dawn, from the perspective of the Volturi wives. An AU where Didyme lives, written for a request.


**THE BEAUTIFUL GIRLS**

**Summary: **The end of Breaking Dawn, from the perspective of the Volturi wives. An AU where Didyme lives, written for a request.**  
**

**Warnings:** Implied sex, implied violence.

**Author's Note: **Merina2, the obvious source of all my current ideas, asked me to write a one-shot about the Volturi wives. Since everything's better when all three of them are alive, and I don't write about modernity as often as I'd like to, I decided on an AU story, where Didyme lives and remains in Volterra. This is set during the finale of _Breaking Dawn_, between December and January, 2006. An enormous thank-you to Merina2 for the plot-bunny!

The title of this story is borrowed from an episode of _Mad Men_.

* * *

The tower room smells of mildew. It's _theirs_, property of the Volturi coven, in a way that the throne hall and the dungeons below are not, but that ownership doesn't extend to cleaning duty. Didyme smiles, imagining her brother with a froth-capped bucket and a scrub brush, hands encased in yellow rubber, tackling near-petrified cobwebs.

The promise of war with the Cullens has made the six of them reclusive. The guards may snarl, and grin, and play at fighting like proud puppies, but the truth of it is that most of them don't remember opposition. Weren't born, even, when little Alec joined the grey-cloaked clan of Italian royalty, and ended the need for true conflict.

She snuggles closer to Marcus on the low couch they share, digging bony elbows into his side and not feeling particularly sorry. If the darling naïf she'd married had just voted for the human girl's death a year ago, there would be no reason to cross the Atlantic. Politics became dull ten centuries ago, and yet, here she is. Leaving takes the kind of courage she has never possessed, a conviction that solitude in the wide, empty world is better than this.

Across from her, Athenodora curls around Caius, a pale, practiced configuration of bodies. She looks just as impatient as Didyme feels. That's always been Athena's best feature—her face is a billboard, sentiments spelled out in neon too bright for politeness.

And Sulpicia sits on her own, waiting for Aro to appear. Nothing new there. Her posture remains regal and rigid, her red gown exquisite. She's an actress in some tragedy of her own devising, and Didyme does not doubt that her sister would not let her mask fall even if she had no observers.

Her brother's arrival tugs at the five of them, a magnetic pull and an electric charge, all in one. He is, so very, very obviously, their heart. Without him—Didyme cannot even begin imagining it. And Aro, so dapper and grinning, pretends that he does not know.

"Merry Christmas, Athena!" he trills, slipping an unmarked envelope into her hands.

"A forged passport? I've dreamed of this day since I was a child," she says, straight-faced. It's the closest she'll come to playing along with his enthusiasm. After a century of shifting identities, one more is hardly cause for excitement.

"And for you, dearest," he says. Didyme finds herself in possession of her improvised documents, thrillingly illegal in her palm. The two of them, Caius' mate and herself, are the worst offenders after the witch twins, requiring new personas every decade. They can't pass for younger than sixteen or older than twenty five, and Didyme delights in being difficult.

"Let me see," she demands, ghosting to Athena's side. She always wants to view her sister's picture first, hoping childishly that it will be a bad one, over-exposed or awkwardly framed. Being the plainest is irritating, but no longer infuriating.

She opens the proffered booklet, running her fingers over slick labels and whorled paper. Athenodora resembles an assassin's alter-ego from a film noir in her photo, all angles and poisoned sweetness. She impersonates a Swedish girl this time, Thea from Malmö, nineteen years old. Painfully beautiful, as ever, and that last observation tastes stale, bitter at the edges.

Their birth names have never made an appearance on paperwork. There is no use in hiding behind something that stands out, syllables screaming of long-fallen civilizations.

"Now yours," the blonde orders, hand outstretched.

Didyme's alias is named Delia, Andalusian and eighteen, with a portrait that whispers of high school, rose lip gloss, the last vestiges of childhood. The fragility of the face in her photos frightens her sometimes, and she has no idea why.

"So, how will this one die?" she wonders, taking her passport back from the Athenodora. They've devised a game, the pair of them, where they invent improbable ends for their latest identities, and then hack the appropriate government archives to add that information to their own death certificates. Marcus finds it macabre. Didyme laughs and laughs, wondering at his lack of playful bleakness. Three thousand years of watching people break each other from the inside out has had no discernible effect on her sweet mate.

"Tragic skiing accident," Athena says, with an ear for the logical.

"I like it. It's suitably Nordic," she says.

"How about yours?"

"Lovelorn suicide, à la Antony and Cleopatra." Didyme grins as she says it, hand pasted dramatically to her forehead.

"Will there be a snake involved?" Athenodora wonders. Her smiles are nowhere near as striking as her anger, but their brightness is compensation.

"Of course. I'm a traditionalist."

They catch their giggles with cupped hands, and let the silence return. There is nothing to be said or planned tonight, but being still together is better than loneliness. They linger, all six of them, for the better part of an hour, until Aro takes his wife's hand, and leads her away.

Somewhere in the dark, Irina is weeping.

[-]

The cold crawls steadily through Athenodora's boots, digging into her toes with blunt little teeth. The barren expanse of the field around her threatens to swallow her whole, and the wind mourns like an orphaned child. This part of America does not appeal to her, she decides, nor do the creatures that inhabit it, these golden-eyed immortals and their ragged allies.

She isn't Caius, and the ranks of wolves don't frighten her. Their proportions are askew, all paws and ears and bones. Beneath the fur, they are likely very young. Her grin sharpens. For all their shrill differences, Carlisle fights his wars just like Aro—grasping, and desperate, and terribly, terribly uncaring. She wonders if the beasts will turn back into boys when Felix and Demetri tear out their throats. Nothing demoralizes quite like the broken corpses of children.

Well, the Romanians might not care. Their ancient enemies were competent, once.

Beside her, Didyme looks horrified. She is usually so vivid, all kohl, and pink cheeks, and silk in summer shades. The absence of smiles jars. Her fear is premature, Athenodora thinks, but she does not enjoy her sister's suffering.

"If they die, we'll soon follow," she whispers in her flawed Etruscan, casting a glance like a stone in the direction of her own mate, and Marcus, and Aro. "It's very romantic. You like that sort of thing."

"You call that comfort?" Didyme says.

"An observation, actually."

"You're awful." Her expression has strayed away from fright, and Athenodora admires her handiwork.

"But you are smiling," she says, squeezing a gloved hand between her fingers. Didyme's demons are the easiest to exorcise.

She hazards a glimpse at Sulpicia then. Her other sister's features are ice, an empty and helpless winter. Athenodora imagines that it's difficult, watching from the outskirts for two thousand years, while Aro takes her ambitions and breaks them like toys. This neat parade of cloaks and guards is so unlike Sulpicia. If the center throne belonged to her, she would force the Cullens to come to Italy, on her terms, and _beg_.

There are no polite condolences to be offered, so Athenodora adjusts the cowls of her cloak, and turns away from the woman to her right.

Besides, the slow unraveling in front of her is much more compelling.

Athenodora can't decipher her own feelings, often enough for discomfort. She does not know if time has hollowed her out, scooping viscera onto the dust, or whether she was born an aberration in the shape of a pretty girl. It hardly matters now.

She does not gasp and thrill at the revelation that Edward's daughter is half-human. The past century has shown her greater miracles, and darker perversions. Isabella's shield is a curiosity, but not damnation. The Volturi, after all, secured their—_her—_ empire with teeth and blood; the witch twins came later. Even the boy from South America, alive and dead, and staring at Renesmee with starved eyes, does not shock her. The world has a way of rushing on beyond the walls of an Italian city.

Something beats against her ribs as she watches her husband kill Irina, a small distance in front of her. It's over so very fast, and then she has nothing to look at save for the mourning sisters, fair-haired and breaking. Absently, she adds two more names to the list of Caius' enemies she keeps in her head, and thinks that if anyone did _that_—quick and meaningless— to Sulpicia or Didyme, she'd scrape out their eyes, rip out their tongue, and leave them alive.

She wonders if Tanya and Kate have minds like her own, with thoughts scratched out of metal and marrow.

The winged pulse in her chest turns leaden, and far too cold.

During the flight home, Athenodora presses close to Caius, eager and intimate and teenaged in her affection. It looks endearing, maybe, to an outsider, but she has her reasons. It's harder, after all, for him to punch some unfortunate guard if all of her weight is resting on his dominant arm. Besides, she can't bring herself to say _Why do you have a death wish?_ and _Don't leave me here_ and _Aro has never had an idea worth dying_ _for_. The knit of her fingers and his will have to do.

[-]

Sulpicia knows her duty.

She shakes the pins from her hair, letting them fly like mad, metal insects and tumble where they may. Her sensible blouse slides off of her, a shadow at her feet. She isn't used to slipping off trousers, but by the gods, she'll make it stunning if it kills her. Finally, when she's naked, she reorders her lips into _that_ expression—her best smile, the one she keeps behind glass and removes for special occasions, faceted with pride, and love bordering on reverence.

"You did the best you could," she tells Aro. "It is not as terrible as it looks."

He'll believe her, she knows. Men always do, when the source of their favourite delusions looks like she does, all golden and wanton and unashamed.

The sconces clinging to the walls of their chamber are in the shapes of beasts, gamboling lions and unfurled eagles with garnet eyes. Sulpicia finds herself staring at the cruel angles of claws, but Aro cannot see that, lips buried at the blue-white juncture of her neck and shoulder.

Still, she muses as she clings to his flesh, like an exquisite shroud, better that he listen to the liar in his bed than the ones outside of it. When he crumples into her arms, she feels tenderness running through her like watery ink, but it is nothing compared to the shame, the fear of a trembling future.

"I am thirsty, my love," she says, as soon as it's seemly, padding out of bed on bare feet, and not glancing back. On most nights, Aro would snarl, displeased at the notion that she wanted to hunt alone. His silence delights and frightens her in equal measure.

[-]

It's the chilly end of New Year's Day, and tourists flood Rome's streets, a seething mass speaking a dozen languages. It has always been like this, a loud and thrumming celebration. Sulpicia smiles as the raw joy of her city, the stone, and iron, and triumph, seep into her. Her sisters' happiness, though the places of their births no longer exist on any map, baffles her. That sort of rootlessness is terrifying, a dark fear that defies description.

Even among the crowds and the black press of night, the three of them stand out. Athenodora is so pale, a drowned girl's ghost, beneath the stormy weave of her coat. Didyme dances on her toes, drunk on blood, although the humans might see it as something more innocuous. At this time of year, the air itself smells of wine. And Sulpicia knows that she is unbearably beautiful. She caught Aro's eye with a fraction of the loveliness she has now, and he had better taste then.

They've fed and thrown the corpses in the Tiber, a time-honoured tradition, practiced for the past three thousand years. Neither of her sisters shows any inclination to return to Volterra just yet, and she's grateful for that. The old walls magnify all things, from sound to sentiment.

Instead, they settle on a bench overlooking the red bones of the Forum.

"Now we're tyrants. How does it feel, sisters?" Didyme says. There's mischief in her grin.

"Tyrant is such a harsh word. I prefer _evil overlord_." Athenodora buries her hands in her pockets, unconcerned, while her dark-haired companion laughs.

"We do have the requisite dungeons," Aro's sister notes, impossibly glad.

"And cloaks. Never forget the cloaks," Sulpicia says, desperate to belong in this bright tangle of careless friendship. She sits between them, a wedge with golden hair.

Didyme smiles nonetheless, and holds her hand with elegant fingers, unpleasantly familiar in shape and grace.

"_That_," Sulpicia says, steering the conversation into colder waters, "was disastrous." She cannot bear to speak of America, of Carlisle and his family, without choking on the fish-bones her own weakness.

"You sound just like Caius," Athenodora says. "But more concise, and less prone to snarling."

Sulpicia does not laugh. She hates Athena sometimes, and Didyme too, for being loved so fiercely that they can mock, break, disobey, without fear or thought.

"The world saw our failure," she insists instead.

The world is not limited to a hundred vampires," her fair-haired sister corrects.

"Give it time, my dear," Didyme adds, and the sugared tendrils of her gift prod at the aching fissures in Sulpicia's mind. "Aro will think of something."

"Without our reputation, we are monsters led by a cheerful madman," she hisses in response, and does not contemplate her husband.

"And the Cullens are children, led by another child who wishes to be their father. That's hardly sane." Athenodora has never disliked Carlisle; Sulpicia suspects she merely enjoys hyperbole.

"They won't try to finish us in some climactic battle to the death," Didyme says, her voice carrying with it the click of closing locks and a discarded subject.

Her sisters don't understand _wanting._ Their desires are not earned with ghostly kisses or parted thighs. They've never cared for empires, the heady spill of power, the red masque of rule. Though Didyme cradles her palm, and Athenodora's hip digs into her leg, Sulpicia has no-one beside her.

[-]

Their homecoming is a rushed affair, preceding the dawn by an hour. Although Volterra sleeps, the low jumble of voices from Aro's study promises the raw beginnings of conquest.

"We might as well—", Didyme sighs, choosing the corridor that leads to her brother's chambers, and entering without knocking when she reaches her destination.

Marcus whispers kisses onto his wife's throat as she settles on the arm of his chair. There is no paper on the table before him, indicating a directionless meeting, punctuated by sharp bursts of impatience.

"Missed you," she tells him, her smile soft and gentle.

"And I, you." His mouth is an intimate configuration upon her skin.

"Were you at least careful?" Caius demands, when Athenodora appears by his side, and slips a cold little hand onto his shoulder.

"No. Didyme made me run across a road with no crosswalk. There was oncoming traffic." She arches her brows and waits for him to suppress a grin at the absurdity of it. He doesn't quite smile, but the shadows of his scowl fade to pallor.

And Sulpicia permits Aro to kiss her knuckles and wander the corridors of her mind. That is a fight for another day; a world waits to be set ablaze.


End file.
